Y el Ganador Es… (And the Winner Is)

posted Dec 19, 2013, 2:49 AM by Unknown user

Nichole Miller

Brice Lawrence

Late fall was a busy time for Van Buren students, but especially busy for Mrs. McIntosh’s Spanish III classes, for the struggle is real for many of them. Mrs. McIntosh, more commonly known as Señora, assigns a piñata project to her Spanish III classes about a month before Thanksgiving break in order to teach her students more about the culture of Spanish speaking countries.

The project entails a lot of time, scheduling, and teamwork from the students. When the projects are done, the groups present their piñatas and the posters that they create along with them. After the piñatas are hung up and the posters are presented each Spanish class votes on their favorite piñata.

Is the hard work and stress worth it? According to the group members of the winning piñata, it was.

Spanish III students Britton Jackson, Bryce Bowers, Drew Conner, and Nathan Maynard won first place in the contest for best piñata, edging out second place by one vote. As a group they made a piñata that looks like a masterpiece, one that is named Kirby.

It wasn’t all fun and games; for instance, Drew Conner said their balloon to mold Kirby popped, so then they needed to blow up another balloon inside of Kirby, to retain the shape. Bowers and Conner did have doubts, stating “we’d go to each other’s houses sometimes, thinking we were going to finish it that night, but we ended up getting hardly anywhere.” Both Bowers and Conner rated the difficulty of the project at an 8 out of 10, and only paid $20 for supplies.

The project was a messy success, but this group did receive first place in the voting that was done by all of the Spanish classes.

Winning second place was a turtle that was created from the turtle Squirt in the movie Finding Nemo. This group included Ashleigh Farr, Audrie Ward, and Alexis Youngpeter.

According to Youngpeter, the project was enjoyable for the most part. She said that she did get upset sometimes due to her perfectionist type of personality. As far as problems go, Alexis mentioned that the time constraint was tough to keep up with, but an even bigger issue occurred when the pinata was in the trunk of her car and became warped and had a hole. The hole was covered up and eventually looked like nothing had ever happened.

When asked if she would change anything about the project if she had to do it again, Ward said, “Our piñata turned out better than I expected so I wouldn’t change a thing.”

In order to see this winning piece of art and the rest of the students’ piñatas, go to Senora McIntosh’s room where they are on display.

In the spring, Señora plans on taking the classes outside to have some traditional Spanish fun by breaking the piñatas.

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